AMD’s Richland APUs: 5GHz overclocks on tap, set the stage for Steamroller

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Today, AMD is officially launching its new Richland series of desktop APU parts. If you’re familiar with the Trinity-based hardware that AMD launched a year ago, or you caught our article on Piledriver for low-end gaming last year, you’ve already got an idea of how these chips stack up against their Intel counterparts. The new processors are debuting as the AMD “6000” family, and each core is more-or-less a straight refresh of the part that came before it, with slightly higher clock speeds. The A10-5800K adds support for DDR3-2133, which may help nudge its graphics performance a bit higher, but by and large, this is a straightforward refresh.

Richland still moves the ball forward for AMD in several important ways. First, power consumption tests show that the new A10-6800K uses only about 4.5% more power at peak load than the A10-5800K, despite being clocked 8% higher at stock. That’s a significant gain for AMD, particularly given that the chips we’re testing are sitting at the top of its product stack. The gains here suggest that Richland yields have improved over the past 12 months across the board.

Another positive development — for top-end hardware that’s already pushing clock speed hard, there’s more headroom in the A10-6800K than existed in the A10-5800K, as shown below:

This is rather different than what we saw when the A10-5800K first debuted. We re-tested that chip, just to confirm it — our CPU wasn’t stable above 4.4GHz without massive voltage increases. The chip’s effective maximum speed, in other words, was just 200MHz, or 4.5%, above its Turbo Core. The A10-6800K doesn’t blow the doors off the room, but we were able to run all four cores at 5GHz on our single sample — 16% faster than the chip’s typical quad-core Turbo frequency of 4.3GHz.

These improvements help explain why AMD has raised its prices slightly with the introduction of the 6000 series; the A10-5800K debuted at $129; the A10-6800K is coming in at $149. Is this enough to fundamentally change the competitive situation with Intel? In a word, no. Here’s the same Cinebench 11.5 comparison, only with Intel’s Core i5-3550 (a $199 chip) and the just-launched Haswell Core i7-4770K thrown into the mix.

Richland’s higher frequencies and better overclocking potential don’t change the current status quo. But they do give us hope that AMD’s next-generation Steamroller is coming along smoothly. New roadmaps from Sunnyvale, quietly updated last week, imply that the third iteration of the Bulldozer architecture could drop quite soon — by the beginning of the fourth quarter.

Kaveri is the Steamroller-based, GCN-equipped APU that will hopefully kick AMD’s single-thread performance out of the doldrums. In its Hot Chips presentation last year, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster showed off a number of design changes being baked into the new core. Steamroller has two decoders capable of dispatching four instructions each rather than a single four-issue decoder serving its integer pipelines. The two decoders work in parallel rather than a staggered formation, and either can dispatch code to the FPU.

AMD is forecasting a 30% increase in decode operations per cycle, a 5-10% improvement in scheduling efficiency, and improved branch prediction. Some of these benefits are going to primarily impact the server market, others will favor desktop, but the bottom line is the same: Steamroller should offer a significant improvement over Piledriver. There’s been a great deal of discussion over whether or not a purported photo of the new die is actually legitimate:

Click to embiggen

If it is, it shows a Steamroller design that’s doubled up in a number of key areas compared to Piledriver. The L1 caches are larger, the registers are wider (this could mean that AMD has gone for 256-bit registers early rather than waiting for Excavator). There’s debate, in fact, over whether this is Excavator or Steamroller, but either way, it points to significant improvements coming in the not-too-distant future.

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also we have not to forget the tracing of CPU by GPU math libraries that gives -30% die area.

simon

Here is a youtube link showing 3dmark11 and windows index rating for the 4770k 3.5ghz Haswell. Not overclocked

Youtube link:
url=http://youtu.be/k7Yo2A__1Xw

tgrech

These easy 5Ghz overclocks(Biggest I’ve seen on air so far is 5.2Ghz) explains how AMD are making these 5(4.8 base)Ghz FX-Cores so easily. Should see a nice boost in performance.

massau

why is there only a cinebench benchmark. the cpu part is worse than intel but the gpu part is better than the intel chip, GT3 doesn’t count because it is only for a laptop.

tgrech

Agreed, GPU, OpenCL, and gaming benchmarks would be nice.

Joel Hruska

I don’t have a Haswell with a functioning graphics core. That means the only thing I have to compare against is the old Core i7 3770K with HD 4000, and we already know that Piledriver is faster than HD 4000.

With a 5% speed gain, Richland is *still* faster than HD 4000.

massau

thanks for replying.

chojin999

And the AMD APU Jaguar at 1.6GHz on Playstation4 and 1.2GHz on XBoxOne is going to be 70% slower than these AMD APU Richland models… Which means that it’s slow and outdated.

tgrech

Jaguar is probably better suited to the role of consoles, Bulldozers module system is no help for gaming, as games gain little to no benefit from multithreading. Because games are very rarely CPU bottlenecked, Jaguar cores are extremely energy efficient, Jaguar seems like a great choice for a living room device. The fact they have 8 of them also helps future proof the games, as more and more games(Battlefield 3/4 for example) begin to take advantage of 8 threads/cores. Given the lack of translation layer and the like, don’t be surprised if a game on a console runs much better than an i5+HD7870 set up.

dns7950

As soon as I read the title of this article I knew i’d find one of your rants here. I must be psychic… Here’s a suggestion for you, why don’t you just make one generic comment where you say “ZOMG it’s fake, it’s a scam, it’s a fraud, you’re all sheep, AMD APU SUX, APPLE RULEZ!!!” and then copy/paste it onto every article? Your comments are never relevant anyways, and you could save time from not having to type up the exact same B.S. over and over again!

Phobos

You do realize the jaguar cores of the ps4 and Xbox are modify meaning they are not quite the same.When you said jaguar is not designed for consoles, so clearly you know more about what’s best for a console than Sony and MS? Why don’t you say something positive instead of spiting moronic comments?

chojin999

You can try to twist reality as much as you want.. these Richland AMD APUs at over 4GHz clock can’t even match an Intel Core i5 performance and are just half the computational power of an Intel Core i7.

The AMD Jaguar APU at 1.6GHz it’s at less than half the speed of a Richland, probably 70% slower.

Going around telling that “it’s a custom APU for Sony and Microsoft OEMs so it’s going to be better” it’s just plain silly, an obvious lie.

I wonder if you are getting paid to go around telling such lies.

AMD can’t do any magic to turn its low performance architecture into faster than Intel ones or on par with Intel ones at 1/3rd the clock speed.

It’s not going to happen, it can’t happen.

And anyone looking at performance numbers for Richland APU should understand it very clearly.

Phobos

1. you are comparing a 140$ cpu( though I do feel Richland should be around $130, not $150) vs a $230+ cpu. Now really?? Even then the IGP of the APUS are still much better than SB,Iv and Haswell IGP and that is true.
2. We go back again you are comparing oranges to apples. Now Why would Sony and MS lie a bout a custom APU and for what? I do wonder if Intel is paying you to troll around?

Joel Detrow

No one’s paying him, he’s just a troll.

chojin999

5 years old write “troll” on the ‘net thinking to sound smart and cool.

chojin999

They lie for money! The managers behind this shameful fake next-gen consoles operation want maximum profit with zero risks and selling outdated ultra-cheap hardware with no R&D costs is what they came up with.

I don’t work for any of the multinationals involved but you seem to.

Otherwise you are very naive kid or naive adult.
If they wanted to deliver new quality products they wouldn’t have chosen the AMD APU Jaguar…

Also you go on talking about end-user public prices.. OEMs buy millions of units at 70-80% discount .. the end-user price means nothing.

Oliver Davis

Are you stupid or something? They will not be 70% slower.

Richland 6800K is 4.1Ghz, there are 4 cores, total processing power is 16.4Ghz split over 4 threads. Jaguar will be 1.6Ghz but there are 8, yes 8, cores. So 1.6Ghz times 8 = 12.8Ghz. So Jaguar will be 80% of the processing power of Richland. Combined with the fact that Jaguar should have a 12% IPC increase it will be 90% of the performance of Richland, but spread over 8 cores for great multitasking and high threaded performance along with games all coded to use 8 true cores, not ‘Hyperthreaded almost cores’ the Jaguar APU will be bloody amazing for the next gen consoles. It is likely it will also boost 4 cores and shut off 4 when gaming on quad coded games. As it is also a low power chip it should be rather cool so the next gen consoles will not get loud when on load either.

With all games coded to use specific hardware, they will run like a dream.

As you are an apple fan, you will understand this. Games for iPhones always run smooth, why? Not because of the ‘amazing hardware’ because most android phones at half the price are twice as powerful as the iPhone 5, but because the developers only have to code for one set of hardware. They can take advantage of specific technologies knowing that all hardware will support it, unlike PC when supported technologies vary from CPU Gen and Manufacture.

If I asked you to build a car to go round every track in the world it would not pull the best times round the Nurburgring, but everyone could enjoy it at their local track. If I asked you to build a car only for the Nurburgring you could cut away loads of excessive stuff that would slow it down as it will not be needed on the Nurburgring. You would end up with much better lap times.

See where I am getting at here? Ask a man to make something everyone will enjoy and it will not be that good. Ask a man to make something for one specific person then it will suit them perfectly.

Please use a little logic in your next post.

Regards, OliverD

Joel Hruska

Oliver,

Now that Jaguar and Richland are both out, we can test this theory. At 1.5GHz, Jaguar’s single-thread performance in Cinebench is 0.39. Richland scores a 1.14 at 4.4GHz.

Do the math and that’s actually not far off. Jaguar and Richland hit ~ the same IPC in Cinebench. It should be noted that this is far from unilaterally true; there are definitely tests where Richland is faster thanks to larger L2 caches and a higher dispatch rate.

Oliver Davis

Hello, thanks for your response. I have read that the tweaked version for the consoles will have a 12% ipc boost compared to the usual APU which in theory would make them as fast. L2 caches are also to be expected to be made larger on the console APUs so this is probably where most of the IPC improvement comes from. Either way my point still stands. It will run great for consoles as everything will be coded for that specific APU.

Thanks

Phobos

People have to wait so they can compare the next gen consoles to see how well they stack. Until then speculation it’s all we can say. I do think the next gen consoles will be alright in terms of hardware.

Joel Hruska

Oliver,

Cache sizes, AFAIK, are the same. We also know that the Xbone’s L2 is still clocked at half speed. But as far as I’m aware, Jaguar is capable of hitting Richland’s IPC in certain workloads. To be fair, this says more about Richland than Jaguar, and not in a good way. ;)

chojin999

You serious? You multiplied the frequency by the number of cores there? Really?

You can’t be serious…

And you go around insulting people calling them stupid…

Little kid, grow up and read some proper books on the subject before insulting others on things you clearly have no clue about.

And Apple has an expensive R&D team for their SoC designs.. the Ax Apple CPU+GPU SoC is the most advanced on the market for a very good reason.
You thinking that standard multi-core higher frequency ARM SoC used by competitors would be more advanced than the Apple ones it’s another absolutely wrong assumption. They are not. Yes, Apple has amazing ARM SoC hardware. expensive R&D there.

Oliver Davis

You are the one claiming the jaguar APU will be 70% slower than Richland. You are not taking in to count the fact the console version will have 8 cores. Double what the APU has. I had to multiply the clock speed by the cores to make you understand. Everything on the consoles will be multithreaded.

As for the iPhone 5, it’s is a 1.3ghz dual core. The new Galaxy S4 is a 1.9ghz quad that benches at more than double the iPhone 5 on geekbench. It’s the app development that makes the iPhone’s seem so smooth gaming. The S4 and HTC One have 1080*1920 screens and games still run smooth at that resolution, occasionally choppy.

So again, with one choice of hardware to code for you can make anything run nicely. The Jaguar APU will run perfectly for the next gen consoles.

Also, why do you refer to them as fake?

Phobos

How can they be fake for the love of Satan??

Phobos

Is this a review or a preview? I hope it’s a preview.

Darkness Dragon

As an Intel user, I would like it if AMD finally gets their gears in action on the desktop scene. It’s looking sad right now with Intel’s Haswell not being a performer & eventually turning to ball-grid array without proper competition.

Mombasa69

I was going i7, but sticking with AMD, APU is the future, next consoles use AMD hardware developers are programming for AMD 8 core, what’s going to run console ports better? AMD 8 core cpu’s for sure, sticking with my FX-8350 and ordered a water cooler for it, going to clock it up some more, and next year probably replace my 3 way 570s for a good single GPU, want to wait an see if Nvdia are still in the game then, if not will switch to a Radeon.

Intel are history that’s for sure.

Kerim Temel

is that why ATI has bad drivers?

NarooN

Bad drivers? I switched to AMD (not ATi, that branding has been long gone) GPU’s in Jan 2012 and have no had any issues at all in running many games since then. But of course, I guess lame memes will become true if clueless people regurgitate them long enough.

And inb4stutter, which was really only prevalent in Crossfire setups, and while it has been minimized, it’ll be fixed in the upcoming drivers next month.

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